Your keyboard gets more contact than almost anything else on your desk. The model you choose affects your wrists, your typing speed, and how you feel after a long shift. Some people want thin, quiet boards for a tidy desk. Others prefer heavy mechanical models with tactile feedback. Wireless cuts cable clutter, compact shapes travel well, and split designs ease wrist strain whether you write reports or  code for hours like these developers . New to the hobby? Read this guide on  choo...

The Apple Watch is one of the most fascinating pieces of modern technology for me. A gorgeous screen, an abundance of sensors, and a bonkers amount of computational power in a tiny little package that fits on your wrist. It reminds me of the Vision Pro in that a good amount of the time I put it on I can’t help but smile at how far technology has come. But it’s also weirdly something I’ve never used a great deal. Every few generations I buy a new one and try it out for a few weeks, but I ...

So here’s the thing. Late last year I bought the excellent SilverStone FLP02 , a retro-themed computer case with modern component support. It was absolutely, jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and has easily become my favourite modern case alongside the legendary NCASE M1. It’s big, relatively easy to work in with just a few caveats (a topic for another time), and yet looks the part so well. I’ve since moved our FreeBSD bhyve/jail server into our FLP02, and am giving serious consideration to an a...

A facility has two identical servers. Customers arrive as a Poisson process and each needs one server for an exponentially distributed service time. Which queueing discipline should the facility use? Separate queues: each server has its own dedicated line; customers randomly pick a line on arrival and cannot switch. Pooled queue: a single shared line feeds whichever server becomes free first. It turns out that pooling the queues is always better, even though both systems have identical...

Where are all the AI-generated projects? This is a common question from AI skeptics: if LLMs are so good at writing code, where is the tsunami of new AI-generated apps, services and games? I personally don’t find this to be much of a paradox. Writing code is only one of the bottlenecks involved in actually shipping a new product, after all. It’s also impossible to talk about the paid work I’ve done with AI (you’ll simply have to take my word that it’s increased my productivity). ...

I present here a monstrous counter-example for sparse linear solvers which operate only on an input sparse matrix. This counter-example is closely related to the nightmare matrices of a previous post , but with a key strengthening: the matrices I present here will be symmetric and positive definite (“SPD” for short). In my prior post I relied on indefiniteness of the matrix to make iterative solutions a non-viable “shortcut” around direct methods. It remained an open question to me whe...

Unary codes are a form of universal variable-length code (UVLC) that are sometimes used on their own but more commonly used as a building block for more general families of UVLCs like Golomb, Rice or Gamma / Exp-Golomb codes. There are multiple conventions in use, the one I’ll use in the following has codewords terminated with a “1” bit and is 0-based, i.e. the codebook goes 0 -> 1 1 -> 01 2 -> 001 3 -> 0001 4 -> 00001 and so forth. That is, some value i ...

House building using the “Oraaflex” modular construction system, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become...

I recently read a blog post claiming that web components can make your design system framework agnostic. But this is down to the false dichotomy between engineers who: love React (or the current popular thing) hate React (or the current popular thing) React is probably a bad choice for your design system. But that’s not an argument against libraries or frameworks. That’s an argument for choosing something better than React. Either way, the claim that web components give you a...

ATHENS (June 2, 2026) – Shield AI today announced that the Hellenic Army has signed a procurement agreement to grow its fleet of V-BAT vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) in support of Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) operations across the Aegean Sea. The Hellenic Army currently uses the V-BAT to deliver intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The acquisition of more platforms will increase Greece’s ability to maintain persistent mari...

Sunday came, Sunday went, but the notes can be week notes any day they want to be.  Current situation: A LIE. This photo is from Sunday when I started these and then did not finish them. It’s Monday now and I’m in bed with rice water toner pads all over my face. I will not be sharing a photo at this time thank you for understanding. I do feel very moisturized. Monday 25 May: Memorial Day, also hospital day. Having to work certain holidays is a new th...

Short post today. New ZJIT contributor dak2 submitted a PR to fix an overflow bug in fixnum division in ZJIT. We did the division fine, but lied about the type of the result in the case of dividing FIXNUM_MIN by -1 . You can see how this is special-cased in CRuby: static inline void rb_fix_divmod_fix ( VALUE a , VALUE b , VALUE * divp , VALUE * modp ) { // ... if ( x == FIXNUM_MIN && y == - 1 ) { if ( divp ) * divp = LON...

Following NASA’s Artemis rejig , catalyzed Moonbase plans , and the crewed Artemis II lunar flyby earlier this year, the agency has been trying to go full speed in its grand plans for returning US astronauts to the Moon alongside placing of long duration infrastructure. It’s to that latter end that on May 26, the agency took another necessary step by announcing firm, fixed price contracts being awarded to teams led by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor) and Lunar Outpost respectively for ...

It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets, making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no longer limited to island nations. It is a great American pursuit, or at least, that's what modern television sports coverage leads you to believe. There has always been an uncomfortable relati...

As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle. But many leaders are neglecting to address how their teams should work with AI in the context of the team as a whole. This creates a lot of unresolved tension, and it’s time for leaders to step up and set some guidelines not just for how to use AI in an “approved” sense, but how to use it respectfully. When I say respectfully, I am not talking about the...

I was thinking of doing something special for the 100th post, but I could not decide what to do, so instead I'll do just some random bits and pieces. I've been living on the Internet since the early 00s and during that time I had many different blogs and blog-like sites. Some disappeared of natural causes, some can still be found. A photo from one of my blog posts from 2009. This is my laptop of that time, a HP Compaq with which I have very fond memories. It's placed on the floor of the ro...

This is my entry for this month’s Bear Blog Carnival, on the topic of staying connected while practicing digital minimalism . Thank you Juni for hosting the Carnival, and for choosing such a fascinating topic! Over the last two years, I have tried to be more intentional about the technology I use. I proactively ask myself the question “do I want to use this tool?” when it comes to websites and applications. When a tool makes me feel overwhelmed, or otherwise doesn’t feel like one I want...

Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; He lists lots of common metrics, and why they are flawed. Sadly he doesn’t give any suggestions on what would be better. In my view, since we cannot measure productivity ,...

I have been tinkering with a little tactics game not so different from Fire Emblem. One thing I'm doing that I think is somewhat novel in the space is involving a technique I learned from studying Timely Dataflow : partially ordered costs for pathfinding. In Timely, it's used to represent complex versions of time that allow for multitemporal processing . I've written about this before but back then I didn't really appreciate all the applications of them. Every time I want to do something, ...

In the hours following the news that Redhat Insights' JavaScript packages fell victim to a supply chain attack via NPM, developers and systems administrators scrambled ensure all of their projects were unaffected from a supply chain attack that steals credentials for AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, npm, and CircleCI before then self-propagating via said stolen npm credentials and the bypass_2fa setting. This establishes persistence via Claude Code hooks and VS Cod...

Odd Scenarios about Research Claims I blogged about OpenAI's achievement of having AI solve a math problem  here . My post had a few comments about authorship of such results. Lance had a post about co-authorship and AI  here There are times when an author on a paper prefers to not be listed as a co-author. There are times when an author wants to give credit in odd places. We give some scenarios. 1) Professors Alice and Bob  prove a theorem. They have their grad student Carol write up the res...

How to create an organic gradient animation using a WebGL shader. How to create an organic gradient animation using a WebGL shader.

Here we go again. Afternoon walk this time around. It’s almost 2pm, and I’m standing in the same parking spot where I got picked up last week. No breakfast in me, but I did have lunch before heading out. Compared to last week’s hike, this one’s gonna be way easier. We have a bit more than 20kms to walk, with roughly 650 meters of ascent and 1300 of descent. Gonna be fun. Before we begin, I’ll have to apologise for the terrible photos I took, especially of the churches. Been a weird w...